Civilization: Beyond Earth Trailer Reveals Affinity and Krakens

Release the Kraken!

A newly released trailer for Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth, shown during this weekend’s PAX event for the title, presents an element of the game known as Master Control. She is an AI and is a bit like Apple’s Siri and serves as a guide to the player’s mission to colonize the alien world.

Master Control talks us through the trailer, presenting one of the game’s new additions to the franchise—Affinity. Affinity is how each given culture opts to adapt to life on the alien world. The faction that the video presents believes that terraforming and avoiding harmful cybernetics are the only way to sustain planetary life. Known as ‘Purity’, this path offers players the ability to maximize their resource yields within their territories.

The trailer later shows what happens when the player faction bumps heads with the Slavic Federation, who for the purposes of the trailer follow the ‘Superiority’ path of Affinity. They embrace a Deus Ex-like cybernetic vision of the future.

There is also an Affinity called Harmony, which believes in the synergistic merging of humans and aliens. It doesn’t show up in the trailer, though.

Just to spice things up, the trailer showcases a battle between the player and a monstrous creature—the Kraken. The Kraken poses a major threat to port cities and thus needs to be eradicated. The player manages to do just that with a combined force of naval and orbital units.